• “A sound heart” is a good heart.

• “A deformed conscience” is a conscience influenced by the laws of society and a sense of duty toward those laws

Mark Twain described the major theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as

“A sound heart and a deformed conscience come into

collision, and conscience suffers defeat.”

Twain’s world• Huck Finn written as a

sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer• Written after the

Emancipation Proclamation • The country was still

confused with regards to race

“By the mark, twain”—

• Racism became worse, with African American’s being persecuted for trivial and unfair reasons

• Twain used this confusion to create his society• Today the novel is seen as an exploration and

historical look at the racial and moral world of the 1880’s.

• The novel is considered Twain’s masterpiece

• Narrator & Protagonist –Huck Finn

• Characters• Jim• Pap• Tom• Duke and King

• Setting• Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845 • The Mississippi River town of St.

Petersburg, Missouri

The world as portrayed in the novelHuck• Fights against

authority• Torn between what

he is told and what he thinks

• Has some aspects of childhood innocence

• Believes in a different type of education

Society• Ruled by fears and

prejudices• Shown as both good

and bad• The wealthy class is

highlighted• Education is key• Religion

Themes• Racism & Slavery

• Intellectual and Moral Education

• The Hypocrisy of “Civilized” Society

Terms • Symbol: Where you have something that

represents something else.– Ex: The river represents the need for freedom

• Irony: Where you expect one thing to happen, but the opposite occurs.

• Paradox: A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true: the paradox that standing is more tiring than walking

Terms• Satire: A literary work in which human

vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.

• Anti-thesis: the rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences (as in “action, not words” or “they promised freedom and provided slavery

Terms

• Colloquialisms: only appropriate for casual, ordinary, familiar, or informal conversation rather than formal speech or writing

The Legacy • Twain began his career writing light,

humorous verse but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind-this was mimicked by many American authors.

• Upon Twain’s death, he was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age, and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature.”

• Hemingway wrote : “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”